Incendies, short film review

I'm always going to be moved and sympathetic to films, which have at their core the struggle of women, especially those who live under oppressive regimes. The French/Canadian production Incendies (flame) (Denis Villeneuve, 2010) is one such film, and although it's primarily about brother and sister twins who travel to the Middle East to fulfill their mother's last wishes after her death, it reveals a tangle of characters whose lives were touched by the 'Woman Who Sings'. I was thoroughly mesmerized by this film shot in Lebanon and Canada. The director's long shot's of silent, endless barren and rocky landscapes bereft of people, served to add greater weight to the already sad and lonely pursuit of Jeanne and Simon Marwan as they embraced, at different times, the alien land of their mother's birth. The film shifts between the present and past and reveals the tragic life of Nawal Marwan (Lubna Asabal), her hatred of the Nationalists, her imprisonment and rape as well as her unwavering love for the child she gave up at birth. This intense, thoughtful and beautifully directed film, with its striking imagery and haunting sound track by Grégoire Hetzel is close to a masterpiece in my mind. It is dramatic and at times almost too hard to bear, I cried quite early in the film in the scene in which both Muslim and Christian's (including Nawal) traveling in a bus were mercilessly shot and then set on fire. But my tears never really abated. The film, which begins in earnest on a melancholy note never relinquishes its hold and the claws of this compelling narrative, way too dreadful to contemplate digs into your psyche until the very end, when some how everything that has happened is resolved in that last frame in which the blood of murder, childbirth and genetic history are evoked in the word Incendies written in red.